http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Philosophy-vs-science-tp6573103p6576845.html
I haven't followed the previous discussions regarding "philosophy vs. science" but I think the "philosophy of science" is vitally important, especially as it pertains to "what is knowledge?" and "what is science?" and especially when things that are science are under attack.
I realised this last year when my alma mater, which had been a typical, somewhat competitive, liberal arts college before, was under attack by biblical inerrantists and young earth creationists who had taken over the denomination with which it had traditionally been associated.
I just wish my eyes didn't glaze over and my mind go numb whenever I'm confronted with anything that smacks of philosophy.
> I agree totally. Everything is incremental, including biological
> evolution, invention, etc.
>
> You may be familiar with Rev. Paley's watchmaker argument in the early
> 1800s, that if you find a gold watch it is dishonest to pretend it
> didn't have a watchmaker, and belongs to no one. Paley argued that
> since biological organisms are even more complex than a watch, surely
> there must be a Designer. Richard Dawkins acknowledges that Paley's
> argument had much force before Darwin showed how evolution could
> produce complex organisms, and Dawkins' book "The Blind Watchmaker"
> discusses the issues in interesting detail.
>
> My wife Ruth Chabay recently made an intriguing observation: the watch
> does NOT have a Designer! The watch is the result of a very long
> evolution through a very large number of very small innovations,
> starting at least with mechanical clocks in the 1300s or earlier (see
> for example the Salisbury Cathedral clock in Wikipedia).
>
> Bruce
>
> On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 9:04 AM, glen e. p. ropella
> <
[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> Not surprisingly, I have an opinion about this too! ;-) I tend to think
>> that all progress, everywhere, in all cases, consists of tiny
>> transitions from prior state. Even the seemingly important or
>> paradigmatic shifts like Newton's or the fall of the Berlin Wall are
>> really the accumulation of many tiny tweaks. It's our thin corpus
>> collosi that delude us into thinking a single person or event is _the_
>> cause of some singular effect ... the assumption that causality is a
>> chain, rather than a mesh.
>>
>> Bruce Sherwood wrote at 07/11/2011 05:09 PM:
>>> Without reading the paper, I can offer one way in which academic
>>> physics is exactly like the description of academic philosophy offered
>>> in earlier postings, namely that much research and scholarship are
>>> tweaks on prior work.
>>>
>>> Some years ago at a workshop we gave for physics faculty about our
>>> intro physics curriculum, we explained that we were trying to make our
>>> course more authentic to the activities of actual living contemporary
>>> physicists, namely that they take some fundamental principles as
>>> given, model complex situations on the basis of these principles by
>>> making approximations, simplifying assumptions, idealizations, etc.,
>>> and compare behavior of the models with observations. Seldom does any
>>> physicist discover a new fundamental principle; most physicists apply
>>> those principles that have proven durable.
>>>
>>> A young physicist said, "Oh, thank you! I had been very confused about
>>> the nature of the discipline! When I read my first physics journal
>>> article, I was very puzzled to get to the end of the paper without
>>> seeing any brand new physics. I thought that what physicists did was
>>> discover new principles, not apply existing ones to new situations."
>>
>>
>> --
>> glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095,
http://tempusdictum.com>>
>>
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>
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http://www.friam.orgMeets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College